This event took place between Oct 16th and Oct 21st in Washington and was the first APS conference I have attended. I ended up really liking the location. Spokane is a medium sized city, but had the energy of a small town, which I enjoyed quite a bit. They even had a good book shop :)
It was an amazing experience because it basically took every single subfield of plasma and formed it into a convention of great people displaying their work. It exposed me to a lot of new topics like dusty plasmas or runaway electrons, as well as deepened my interest for other areas like computational plasma. But I think I could work on talking and introducing myself to people at posters.
One talk that I enjoyed was by Tunde Fulop and was about runaway electrons in tokamaks. I learned about the causes (seeds) of runaways – the avalanche effect is especially interesting since that is what causes lightning. So there is essentially lighting going on in a tokamak (no wonder we are researching them for safety). For work, I actually made a slide to summarize Tunde’s presentation.
I also presented a poster for my work at UCLA, which you can find here. I did this undergraduate research with Troy Carter and Phil Travis :)